The political causes of the global food shortage should surprise no one who has lived in the Caribbean. For decades the world’s economic superpowers have forced the doctrines of the Washington Consensus – deregulation, the elimination of subsidies, and exposure to foreign investors – onto any developing country they could lay the IMF or World Bank’s hands on. In 2001, Life and Debt, an award-winning documentary about Jamaica’s ‘structural adjustments’ chronicled the human cost of these policies in poignant detail. As the IMF’s policies took effect, the Jamaican dairy industry could not compete against imported powdered milk and was soon wasting hundreds of gallons of fresh milk each day because of the collapse of the local market; farmers selling chickens for 50 cents a pound were put out of business by bulk imports from the US which sold at less than half that price, and the local labour market was restructured to facilitate sweatshops for American clothing manufacturers like Tommy Hilfiger, under the cover of a special trade-friendly zone.
When Michael Manley tried to shield local farmers from the full impact of these reforms, he recalled being told: “No, no, no. Your inflation last year was 18% and we are not allowing you to lend to your farmers at 12%. You must charge 23%.” Eventually his government had to accept that its domestic agenda would be scuttled by neoliberal ideologues in Washington. In the circumstances, economic survival was possible only with the wholesale adoption of trade agreements which ensured that countries like Jamaica could never compete successfully with better-established economies.
Jamaica’s woes have tended to be not the exception but the rule in developing world. The trade agreements which have arisen from these crises have allowed a handful of countries to gain what amounts to monopoly control of world markets for basic foodstuffs which feed hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people. (The US, for example, produces 40% of the world’s total grain exports each year.) And so, faced with a perfect storm of crop failures, financial crises and rising transportation costs, few developing countries have the agricultural flexibility, or the economic clout necessary to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of international trade. The resulting dependency of poor countries on international relief is scarcely believable. Today 73 million people in 78 countries would starve if they didn’t receive handouts from the UN’s World Food Programme.
